As tech giants continue to be hit by massive layoffs amid challenging marketing environments, Google has reportedly come up with yet another structure that aims to lay off 10,000 poor-performing employees.
The company intends to introduce a new performance management system that could give managers the power to fire thousands of its underperforming employees from early next year. Under it, managers will be asked to categorize 6% (In contrast to the customary 2%) of Alphabet’s workforce as poor performers. This figure corresponds to about 10,000 employees.
As such, employees that receive low-performance ratings from their managers will be let go. In addition, the ratings may also be used to stop giving out incentives and stock awards.
In a letter written to Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Christopher Hohn, a billionaire UK investor, argued that the company’s headcount is excessive as compared to hiring patterns in the past and thus, does not meet the current business situation. He also complained that the employees were paid way too much against their counterparts in other tech giants and the company could be adequately administered even with many fewer highly compensated professionals. Hohn wrote this letter on behalf of TCI, which is a hedge fund that owns $6 billion worth of Alphabet shares.
Just earlier this month, there was news about Amazon preparing to lay off thousands of employees amid economic turmoil, and Facebook owner Meta announced the mass layoff of more than 11,000 employees worldwide.
Source: Christoper Hohn (letter), The Independent